Following the publication of Bruce Moore’s book Gold! Gold! Gold! The Language of the Nineteenth-Century Australian Gold Rushes (Oxford University Press, 2000), we have placed some important source material dealing with the gold rushes on our website. These documents (some 140,000 words) are from Victorian newspapers in the early 1850s.
The material will be of interest to social historians, but it will be of special interest to teachers and students. Many schools, for example, study the gold rushes as part of their history programs, and the documents provide useful material for class exercises and discussion. The newspapers provide vibrant first-hand accounts of the effects of the discovery of gold on Australian society. They also provide accounts of the difficulties of getting to the goldfields, detailed descriptions of life on the goldfields, and information about social problems associated with the goldfields (gambling, illegal selling of alcohol, robberies, etc).
We invite you to visit our website at <http://www.anu.edu.au/ANDC>
Many readers have asked us for back issues of Ozwords. Most of these are now unavailable in hard copy. Indeed, from what we are given to understand, these past issues are now regarded somewhat as ‘collector’s items’. However, we have made these past issues available at our website so that all may peruse them.
Frederick Ludowyk
Editor, Ozwords